1888 United States presidential election in Virginia

1888 United States presidential election in Virginia

← 1884 November 6, 1888 1892 →
 
Nominee Grover Cleveland Benjamin Harrison
Party Democratic Republican
Home state New York Indiana
Running mate Allen G. Thurman Levi P. Morton
Electoral vote 12 0
Popular vote 152,004 150,399
Percentage 49.99% 49.46%

County Results

President before election

Grover Cleveland
Democratic

Elected President

Benjamin Harrison
Republican

The 1888 United States presidential election in Virginia took place on November 6, 1888, as part of the 1888 United States presidential election. Voters chose 12 representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.

Virginia voted for the Democratic candidate, incumbent President Grover Cleveland over the Republican candidate, former U.S. Senator Benjamin Harrison. The contest in Virginia was very close and Cleveland narrowly won the state by a margin of just 0.53 percentage points. This was the closest the Republican Party came to winning an ex-Confederate state between the Compromise of 1877 and Warren G. Harding’s 1920 win in Tennessee, and with Virginia voting 0.30 points more Republican than the nation at-large, would also prove the last time any former Confederate state voted more Republican than the nation until Virginia itself did so in 1952.

This election represented the height of the expanded Reconstruction Era electorate. So complete was to be the disfranchisement of Virginia's lower classes with the new Constitution of 1902[1] that it was 1952, with a much larger population, before the electorate returned to the same numbers observed in 1888.[2][a]

  1. ^ Key, Valdimer Orlando; Southern Politics in State and Nation, p. 15 Alfred A. Knopf (1949)
  2. ^ Dave Leip's U.S. Election Atlas; Presidential General Election Results Comparison — Virginia


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